White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (review)

The book makes three contributions to the field of the study of postwar politics in America. First, it aims to show the enduring importance of ethnicity, religion, and national origins. Second, the author argues that white ethnic subcultures varied in their political ideologies, and these subcultures provided for the descendants of European immigrants a distinct prism through which they viewed issues of race and class. Third, the author argues that the dissolution of the New Deal coalition between African Americans and American Jews began in the 1940s as American Jews and Catholics developed divergent political subcultures based on religious theologies and ideologies. The dissolution, in other words, first emerged as a division between Catholics and Jews in the 1940s.

The author begins his argument by examining the persistence of ethnicity in postwar New York City. He examines New York’s residential, occupational, and educational segregation with a focus on the three white ethnic groups—Jews, Irish Catholics, and Italian Catholics. Neighborhoods were segregated by national origin and religion. Because there were more students in Catholic parochial schools than in yeshivas, Catholic students were more likely to receive a religious education than Jewish students. Catholics were more likely to be active in church groups and attend religious services than Jewish New Yorkers. There also were class distinctions between the three white ethnic groups. Jews were more likely than Italian and Irish Catholics to be self-employed, professionals, and managers. The author argues that this difference contributed to each group’s distinct outlook on issues of dissent, authority, and intellectual freedom, and thereby politics.

In chapter two Zeitz argues that postwar New York secular and religious Jews looked at Jewish history as one of intellectual and social dissent. Secular events and cultural products were interpreted within the Judaic theological tradition through the prism of dissent. In short, in the postwar period, New York Jews created a subculture that encouraged dissent and the questioning of authority. In chapter three the author examines the subculture that developed within the Catholic Church and its schools, and he argues that it was one of obedience to authority. Italian and Irish Catholics had created a subculture of passivity and respect for authority, hierarchy, and law and order.

These two subcultures led to quite different politics during the Cold War era. While New York Jews remained the loyal liberal branch of the Democratic Party, Catholics began leaving the New Deal coalition and allying themselves with conservative, anti-communist McCarthyism.

On issues of race and civil rights, we see the city’s political alliances shifting. The Catholic Church had strong civil rights positions calling for race reform policies, and Jewish New Yorkers raised on a subculture of dissent could and did join the civil rights movement. As Zeitz points out, however, the white population could endorse abstract civil rights reforms as long as these did not incur any expense to them. Mayor John Lindsay’s welfare, education, and housing reform policies met with resistance on the part of white Jewish and Catholic New Yorkers who formed a political bloc against his race reforms. Lindsay’s welfare policies, in which ex-offenders were given public assistance, were resisted by New York’s white ethnics. As Lindsay’s educational policies of decentralization brought forth a burst of antisemitism and his housing policies called for the erection of large public housing projects in the midst of Jewish residential neighborhoods, New York’s Jewish residents joined other white ethnic groups in resisting specific reforms.

In chapter eight Zeitz examines the antiwar movement and campus unrests, specifically on the Columbia and Fordham university campuses. He argues that Jewish students were prominent as leaders in the Columbia student sit-ins and that parents were supportive of the students. At Fordham, on the other hand, parents and alumni were not supportive of the student sit-ins, and some asked for the students’ suspension from the university. By 1970 the...